Sherry Chandler

Kentucky poet Lynnell Edwards’s poem “Planting Dahlias with a Pick-Axe” is featured today on Verse Daily.

The poem is from Lynnell’s new collection The Highwayman’s Wife from Red Hen Press.

James Wood has a long review of The Road in The New Republic, now available at Powell’s. It’s a good read for itself, as I find most New Republic reviews are, but I bring it up here because Woods voices some of my own reservations about the novel:

There is no obligation for The Road to answer an unanswerable dilemma like theodicy. It is a novel, not a treatise. But the placement of what looks like a paragraph of religious consolation at the end of such a novel is striking, and it throws the novel off balance, precisely because theology has not seemed exactly central to the book’s inquiry. One has a persistent, uneasy sense that theodicy and the absent God have been merely exploited by the book, engaged with too lightly, without enough pressure of interrogation. When Ely says that “there is no God and we are his prophets,” the phrase seems a little trite in its neat paradox of negation.

In this respect, to compare McCarthy to Beckett, as some reviewers have done, is to flatter McCarthy. His reticence and his minimalism work superbly at evocation, but they exhaust themselves when philosophy presses down. The style that is so good at the glancing, the lyrical, the half-expressed struggles to deal adequately with the metaphysical questions that apocalypse raises.

What Wood expresses for me here is the feeling I had that all the religious symbolism was just there for window dressing, and what this boils down to is an adventure novel with some window dressing.

I get back to my question of the feminine. I suppose one could argue that when you’ve killed the earth, you’ve killed the feminine aspect of God. And perhaps the whole novel is about what happens when the Mother dies.

But if that is the case, the ending is even more contrived and jarring than I’d thought. To let the father die just before the son is delivered into what my son would call “a cozy apocalypse” and into the arms of a replacement mother, well, jeez, it’s sentimental. It glances away from the horror at the end.

I don’t have any experience reading McCarthy beyond The Road but there is nothing in it that leads me to disagree with Wood’s statement that he deals in “bloody battles between good and evil.”

All McCarthy’s remarkable effects notwithstanding, there remains the matter of his meaning. There is another vaudevillian strain in The Road, a troubling one, in the way the novelist manipulates his theological material. McCarthy’s work has always been interested in theodicy, and somewhat shallowly. Here the comparisons to Melville and Hardy are rather inexact. McCarthy likes to stage bloody fights between good and evil, and his commentary tends toward the easily fatalistic. There is nothing easy about the machinery of this book — the mise-en-scène, the often breathtaking writing, the terrifying concentration of the evocation — but there is something perhaps a little showy, a little glib, about the way that questions of belief are raised and dropped.

When your world view is Cartesian: good and evil, black and white (and the world of The Road seems more black than white with the only color that bright red can of Coca Cola they find), then there is no room for the nuance a mother would bring.

In the end, I come rather regretfully to the conclusion that The Road is a flashy piece, a virtuoso exercise. Very impressive but it teaches me nothing. To give Wood the last word:

The question of endings in an apocalypse must be philosophical as well as merely emotional, even in a novel.